"No Alcohol Allowed On The Streets Near This Shop"

"[S]ince the 1890s thousands of Jewish, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese workers, among others, have arrived in [London], often displacing the indigenous population. Yes, there was hateful overt racism and discrimination ...But, over time, I believe we settled down into a happy mix of incorporation and shared aspiration," observes Londoner Jane Kelly, writing here.

Braving the tags "racist" and "Islamophobe" Jane identifies what many critics of mass immigration with little attempt at integration into the prevailing ethos also see as a modern British calamity.

"Of the 8.17 million people in London, one million are Muslim, with the majority of them young families. That is not, in reality, a great number. But because so many Muslims increasingly insist on emphasising their separateness, it feels as if they have taken over...

.... Things have changed. I am living in a place where I am a stranger....

 More worryingly, I feel that public spaces are becoming contested. One food store has recently installed a sign banning alcohol on the premises. Fair enough. But it also says: “No alcohol allowed on the streets near this shop.” I am no fan of street drinking, and rowdy behaviour and loutish individuals are an aspect of modern British ''culture’’ I hate. But I feel uneasy that this shopkeeper wants to control the streets outside his shop...."

Of course, in English Law, he has no right to do so: similarly, homeowners who try to book much-needed and much-coveted parking spaces for themselves by placing "traffic cones" or bollards in the roadway immediately outside their premises are in the wrong.

But try explaining English Law to the  temperance campaigner in this video:

How very different from the genteel ladies and other participants who took part in the temperance movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, eh?